A Meeting of Minds on Data and Decision Making

In celebration of 125 years, the Georgetown Law Library convened a symposium of the academic, advocacy, government, and library communities on January 30, 2013 at Georgetown Law.

“Big data” is a term perhaps too narrow for the topic: The size of data sets is not the key to big data issues. Rather, it’s the changes in society that are growing along with our ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across numerous, vast, and often unrelated stores of data.

The conference examined the public good and collective harms associated with the large-scale aggregation of information from public and private sources. During the course of the day, panelists also discussed how scholars, researchers, and information professionals use very large or complex data sets to distill meaning and develop public policy.